


Easy

by chaoticamanda



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Depression, Friendship, Self-Harm, but only kind of??, its really sad and could be triggering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 04:26:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3922840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticamanda/pseuds/chaoticamanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He comes home as the sun sets, his heart sinking with each step. Mabel will ask him where he was all day and then launch into a loud account of her own day with Grenda and Candy. Stan will sometimes chime in about how he could’ve used Dipper’s help at the shack with some gimmick. Dipper only looks down at the table until it’s okay to stop pretending to eat and go to bed. He leaves Mabel and Stan talking animatedly by themselves at the dinner table. <br/>They don’t need him. <br/>They don’t want him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Easy

It is so _easy_ for everyone. 

It’s so easy to push him aside, to put their own agendas first, to leave him behind in the dust. To abandon him when he needs them the most. 

It’s so easy for him to let it happen. 

Dipper tells himself that they don’t mean it, that they’re just caught up in their own little bubbles. Tomorrow they will help him like they promised. They won’t make fun of him. They won’t look at him a little sideways. 

The more he thinks these things, the more bitter the thoughts become until he sticks his tongue out to get the bad taste out of his mouth. After a while the bitterness fades, and he feels like he is starting to fade too. He stops asking them for help-- stops bothering them. Dipper finds a spot in the forest that’s quiet and where no one comes to ask him for help either. 

He’s not very sure they even look for him. 

He comes home as the sun sets, his heart sinking with each step. Mabel will ask him where he was all day and then launch into a loud account of her own day with Grenda and Candy. Stan will sometimes chime in about how he could’ve used Dipper’s help at the shack with some gimmick. Dipper only looks down at the table until it’s okay to stop pretending to eat and go to bed. He leaves Mabel and Stan talking animatedly by themselves at the dinner table. 

They don’t need him. 

They don’t want him. 

He pulls up the covers so that Mabel won’t be able to see his tearstained face when she comes in. Deep down he wants to leave the sheets below his face, just to see if she’d do anything. He bets that it's become more than easy for her to pretend she doesn’t notice anything is wrong with her twin. 

He hopes that maybe he’s wrong, that maybe he’s just good at hiding it. He wants them to pull him from this fog surrounding him and make him feel loved and wanted and _important_ again. Dipper will never admit it. 

One day when he is walking to his lonely little spot, he hears a rustling near by and investigates, because that part of him hasn’t broken yet. It turns out to be a possessed rabbit that causes him to fall and cut his hands as he is running away from it’s sharp teeth. The rabbit only laughs at him and bounces away, but he lays there staring at the blood on his hands. He doesn’t like the pain exactly, but it makes him _feel_ real, like he is grounded to the world once more. 

Dipper begins to wear hoodies, and no one questions him on it. He begins to become reckless, fighting things he has virtually no chance of winning against, relishing in the bruises that tell him he’s alive. 

The journal takes a backseat as he stops looking for answers and begins to search for a reason to stick around. 

He wonders if Stan or Mabel or Wendy or Soos would even notice that he had gone. 

He decides to test it one day, heading into the town instead of into the woods. He plans to find somewhere else to sleep, and to return in the morning to see what happens. Dipper cuts his hand scrambling over a fence so that Grunkle Stan wouldn’t see him when he sped by in the Soos’s truck, something questionable in the back of it. 

Dipper walks, observing the people and ignoring the sting in his hand. It will heal, just like everything else has. Somewhere in the bottom of his heart he hopes Mabel will find him and will show him that she still cares about him. That she hasn’t forgotten her lesser important brother. 

His eyes well with tears because he’s sure it won’t happen. She has so many friends here and he has no one now. 

Dipper is too busy wallowing in his loneliness to realize he's walking into someone until it's too late. It's Pacifica, and she regards him with wide eyes. "Dipper?" She asks, "What are you doing?"

 _Sorry,_ he thinks, _Dipper's not home anymore. Leave a message at the beep._

"Oh, j-just going for a walk, y'know. Admiring the beautiful day." It's overcast and muggy out. 

"You're bleeding," she says, reaching for his hand. She never would have done that before-- touched a commoner like him. Pacifica has changed too. 

He shrugs it off, pulling his hand back and looking away from her. Dipper ignores the worry he can see in her eyes out of the corner of his own. "It's nothing." 

She doesn't say anything for a minute, and he thinks she'll leave him alone like everyone else. He's too prideful to admit that he doesn't want her to. 

"Do you wanna go get some ice cream?" She asks, making his eyes jerk to hers. 

Dipper has always been suspicious of everyone in this town, and Pacifica has always been high on the list. "Why?" He spits, causing her to flinch. 

"Because you look like you need one." 

"I don't need your charity, Pacifica." _Please don't leave me, I'm sorry, I can't help it, please, please, please._

She recoils, and her words become venomous, "It's not charity. It's being a friend." 

Dipper needs one of those. It takes most of his strength to push away his suspicions, his doubts, and say softly, "I'm sorry." 

"It's okay. Come on." 

She leads him to an ice cream shop on a corner, and it is mostly empty because of the crappy weather. She makes him go into the bathroom to wash the blood off of his hand. He feels sick when he looks at it. The ice cream is cold and he likes the way it burns when he leaves it against his lips for too long. It reminds him of better times. 

"So," she talks around her own strawberry cone, "what have you been up to?" 

"Nothing," he answers truthfully. "Reading, I guess." 

"Don't you and Mabel go on adventures or whatever?" She's trying to understand him, and he can see that there is no malicious intent behind her words. He breathes for the first time in weeks. 

"She's...busy, I guess. Doing her own thing." He looks down at the wooden table between them. He hasn't actually heard what Mabel had been saying to him as of late. 

"Oh." Pacifica continues to nibble at her ice cream, taking care not to let any of it drip onto her clothes. She's wearing a skirt and short-sleeved shirt, but she's still sweating. "How are you wearing that sweatshirt?"

Dipper gets defensive, afraid that she is finally going to turn on him. "What?"

"It's like, a billion degrees. You're going to get heat stroke-- you should take it off," she doesn't know when she became so worried about Dipper Pines' health. 

His eyes widen and he tries to find a way out, self-concsious. The bruises and scratches that had ground him to the world seem stupid and silly now. He doesn't want her to know his guilty secrets. 

But he does, he realizes. He does, because otherwise he would have left her back on the street. He wants someone else to know, to care. 

Dipper swallows. 

He pulls up his sweatshirt slowly, his heart pounding. His arms are littered with bruises that are all different colors, and the tip of a scratch is peeking out of the top of his shirt. Smaller, insignificant scratches are scattered across his neck and his shoulders. 

Pacifica gasped, and Dipper couldn’t look at her. She wasn’t exactly the best friend he’d ever had, but nonetheless, he was going to lose her. He traced a blotchy purple mark with his finger. 

“Dipper!” She cried, her ice cream falling onto the table in front of her. Some of it splashed onto her shirt, but she didn’t even flinch, “What happened? Who did this to you?”

He met her eyes with surprise. It was something that he never thought she’d ask, never dared to hope. It stunned him for a moment, but her worried eyes brought him back to himself. “I...a bunch of things.”

“Dipper,” her voice is low, and she rubs a spot on her hand, and for the first time he notices a round scar the size of a cigar. “Did your family do this to you?”

“What? No!” Well, if one looked at it in such a skewered way as he was prone to do, it could be. They had forced him to be alone in the woods, and consequently discover the reality of pain. “They don’t do anything.”

His lower lip begins to wobble then, and everything seems to hit him all at once. Dipper shoves himself away from the table and shoots out of the shop as quick as he can. He doesn’t know where he’s going, or what he’s even going to do, but he doesn’t stop running until he’s barely breathing. He ends up at the water tower, and as he is climbing up, panting, a voice shouts up to him, “Dipper, wait!”

He doesn’t know how Pacifica found him, but he decides it doesn’t matter. The higher he gets, the less things matter. 

When he reaches the top, he just stands and stares at the town before him. Pacifica is making her way up the ladder-- he knows because he can hear her frantic breathing. There is a breeze that worms its way through the holes in his shirt, and he shivers. When she finally reaches the top, she seeks him out, her eyes distraught. 

He doesn’t look at her, just keeps his eyes on the swaying trees. He feels her hand tentatively slip into his. “Tell me,” she asks, staring out at the world with him. 

Dipper can already feel the ball rising in his throat, threatening to silence him. “I’m so alone,” he whispers. “They don’t want me. They don’t need me.” Dipper finally looks at her, “What’s the point?”

Pacifica is silent for a few seconds, her own eyes beginning to water, “Because where would this town be without you?”

“I’m just a speck of dust to this town. A nuisance at best. To the town, to Stan, to Mabel.” He spits the words out, the bitter flavor returning. 

“Mabel loves you,” Pacifica says with conviction, like she’s never been more sure of anything in her life. It’s saying a lot, because lately she’s not too sure about a single thing in her life.

“They don’t care!” His voice is dripping with venom, poison beginning to seep out of him. “I don’t eat, I don’t talk, I let things hurt me, and they don’t care! They don’t even notice!”

The tears were streaming down his face. Pacifica bit her tongue, but then opened her mouth to speak, “Dipper...your family loves you. Trust me. I...I know what it’s like for your family to not care.”

“If they love me so much, then why don’t they ask me what’s wrong? Why don’t they talk to me?” He was almost shouting around his tears, but it didn’t matter. No one could hear them up on the water tower, and no one cared to listen even if they could.

“Do you let them?”She asks before she can stop herself. 

Dipper doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits on the metal sheeting and breathes shakily. She follows suit, leaning against the water tank. She lets him finish his crying, staring at the sky as it begins to orange behind the clouds. “I don’t want to go back. Not tonight.”

“So...we’ll stay up here.” Pacifica knows that she can procure some sleeping bags and some food for them to eat. It was supposed to clear up by seven, so they shouldn’t have a problem. “We’ll have a....a sleepover.”

Dipper looks at her, and she thinks he’s going to snap at her, but he just nods weakly instead. “I’ll be back. Wait for me...okay?” She doesn’t know if she can trust him up here by himself, and if he jumps, his death will be on her. But something in the way he looks at her tells her that he will be fine. Nonetheless, she goes as quick as she can. 

When she returns, he’s resting his head against the water tank, and the sky has lightened. She sets down all the things she’s hiked up there and awkwardly stands next to him. “I...I’ve never had a sleepover before,” She admits quietly, mostly to herself. 

“What?” Dipper is looking at her oddly. Lonely as he was of late, he’d always had Mabel or some friends from school that would stay over. 

“My...no one was good enough to stay in my parents eyes,” She looks away and then down to all of her gear. “I hope this is okay.”

Dipper stares at the large amount of commodities she has brought, and he can see her insecurity. For the first time in weeks, the fog has cleared and he can see a little clearer. Pacifica is standing next to him. “Yeah,” he says, mustering up a smile, “It’s okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> this started off as a tiny drabble about depressed dipper because i was working through some things, but then pacifica came along and i??? kind of want to write more of them?? maybe


End file.
